How Joy Creative Shop automated sales tax compliance and saved 10 hours a month

Introduction

From Etsy side hustle to seven-figure gifting brand.

Steph started Joy Creative Shop in 2010 as a side hustle after her first child, a creative outlet drawing on a career in greeting cards. She opened an Etsy shop when the marketplace was still new, and organic word of mouth turned a hobby into a business.

Today the brand sells stationery and gifting products, including notepads, note cards, gift tags and stickers, and proprietary products like the Bag of Tags™️, direct to consumer through Shopify and Etsy.
Joy Creative Shop has scaled from six figures to seven and keeps climbing. But the growth came with something Steph hadn’t planned for.

Every new state was a sign the brand was reaching more customers across the country, and it also meant more sales tax to manage, one of the few jobs Steph had never taken off her own plate.

Challenge

Operations got delegated. Sales tax stayed on the founder’s plate.

When Steph hit the ceiling of what she knew operationally, she brought on a business partner to take over Joy Creative Shop’s operations. Sales tax was the exception. It had been Steph’s since the early Etsy days, so it stayed with her.

And for a while, that worked. The company only had sales tax obligations in Texas, and filing in one state was simple enough to keep doing.

“Because we only had to file in one state, it was doable. Even though I wasn’t doing it well,” Steph says.

But as the brand grew, complexity crept in. Etsy began filing and remitting on marketplace sales, and Steph kept combining totals across both channels the way she always had. For a stretch, Joy Creative Shop was paying tax on Etsy sales that Etsy had already covered.

“I don’t ever remember knowing or being told that Etsy was submitting,” she says. “I’m sure they told us. I just probably missed it.”

They were never out of compliance. If anything, they were being overly careful, and it added up.

“That’s tens of thousands of dollars of sales that we double paid for, probably over a couple of quarters,” she says. “And then we had to invest a lot of work into the undoing.”

More growth over the last two years changed the math again. As Joy Creative Shop crossed nexus thresholds in new states, every new state they grew into introduced a new set of registration requirements, deadlines, and filing schedules.

The single-state workload Steph had been absorbing on the side was about to multiply across every state they were growing into.

It was time to get sales tax off the founder’s plate.

Solution

Multi-state compliance handled by real people, not just software.

Steph’s business partner ran the evaluation, comparing TaxCloud against several sales tax compliance providers before handling the initial calls himself. But the decision wasn’t just based on his research. It was the read he got from the process itself.

“It sounds a little woo woo, but there’s an energy to it. Whoever he spoke with on those calls, the follow-up emails, he had such good feelings about TaxCloud. And by then it was a need, not just a want.”

During setup, some Texas payments stopped showing as paid. TaxCloud’s team worked through it with Ty until it was resolved.

“The team has been phenomenal in sorting it all out and getting back to us really timely.”

At renewal, Joy Creative Shop’s order count looked high enough to bump them into a higher pricing tier. Her business partner flagged it, and TaxCloud checked their account before renewing anything. The tier bump wasn’t warranted, so they kept their existing pricing.

Software won’t catch issues like these on its own. Real humans who know your account will.

Results

Sales tax handled. A full workday reclaimed each month.

Today, Joy Creative Shop’s sales tax runs on its own. Shopify Tax handles calculation at the checkout, and TaxCloud handles everything after that: nexus tracking, new states as they’re added, and every return filed on schedule.

Steph and Ty still see sales tax in the monthly and quarterly numbers. Neither of them touches the day-to-day.

“With the size we’re at now, sales tax is a pretty major piece for us. And it’s all done automatically, so we’re not the ones submitting each step. With TaxCloud, it gets handled for us every month.”

A year in, here’s what changed.

• Triggering nexus in new states is a non-event. A notice arrives, the state is added, the filing happens. Steph’s reaction to a new state notice also turned a corner: “Instead of being sad about it, because it’s like, well, that’s money out the door, to us it’s cause for celebration. It means we’re getting that many more customers throughout the country.”
• Sales tax stopped being something to worry about. For Steph, sales tax sits alongside banking and payments as an area a business cannot afford to get wrong. “That little bit of worry that we’re not doing it right has gone away.”
• More time spent on growing the business. Working with TaxCloud has saved Steph and Ty 8 to 10 hours a month, by Steph’s estimate. And that saving grows with every state they add. “To have someone take that off our plate, so that we’re able to take those eight to ten hours or more and put it back into our company in a way that the output will be so much stronger, has been huge.”

Looking ahead

A founder free to focus on what’s next.

Steph is the first to admit the next chapter isn’t fully mapped yet.

“I need to do a better job of dreaming about what all that looks like as we keep growing.”

But that’s the point. With sales tax handled, it’s not taking up space anymore, and the time it used to take goes back into the business or personal time.

Her advice to founders in the same position is direct. Work out what you are weakest at and cannot afford to get wrong, find a partner sized right for your business, and don’t overthink it.